Mr. Paul Joyce:

That is the strong view of the office. It is a creation of statute and cannot take sides. It is an independent office. There is no specific service consumer complainants can access to prepare their complaints. In some cases money advisers from MABS can help. In other instances we have helped. There is a patchwork of organisations here and there but there is no dedicated place where one can go to help formulate one’s complaint. That would be a help to start with, because obviously if a complaint gets off on the wrong foot and one does not make the appropriate submissions and word things carefully it can affect the complaint.

That is one concrete thing that could be done. There is also no database of decisions available. If a consumer wants to make a complaint about a particular issue one should be able to log on to a part of the website and see how similar issues might have been treated previously to help one formulate one’s arguments. An appeal to the Circuit Court is not ideal but it is preferable to a limited appeal to the High Court where the risk of substantial legal costs is high.

As I am sure Deputy Boyd Barrett knows, our organisation also works very much to reform the civil legal aid system. We are also of the view that people should be able to apply for and receive civil legal aid in appropriate cases for appeals to the Circuit Court. In addition, we say the appeal to the Circuit Court should follow the normal fashion of appeals. Although the decision is made by the ombudsman, the appeal should be against the financial service provider. That would normally be the case, for example, with unfair dismissal cases. What happens at the moment is the Financial Services Ombudsman acts as the respondent to appeals and comes into the High Court to defend the office's decision. That is unnecessary in many instances.

There is a fundamental problem of expertise on the part of the institution. In a lot of cases people felt they were being thrown a lot of technical paperwork which was obscuring their complaint. A number of people felt that an oral hearing where they could be in the room and address questions to the people they dealt with and have somebody listen to the case would address their complaint much more comprehensively and they would feel much more vindicated rather than going through a paper process.